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Version: 2.0 (deprecated)

Backends

How to enable specific functionality.


Pants has some basic, non-language-specific functionality built in to its core. For example, you can count the lines of code under some directory in your repo:

Bash
$ ./pants count-loc 'src/**'
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Language Files Lines Blanks Comments Code Complexity
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Python 13 155 50 22 83 5
BASH 2 261 29 22 210 10
JSON 2 25 0 0 25 0
...

However most Pants functionality, including all language-specific functionality, is provided via backends.

A backend is a Python package that implements some required functionality, and uses hooks to register itself with Pants. You enable a backend by listing it under the backend_packages config key in pants.toml.

For example, to enable Python support:

pants.toml
[GLOBAL]
backend_packages = ["pants.backend.python"]